Foglight for Databases vs Toad for Oracle comparison

Foglight for Databases and Toad for Oracle are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Foglight for Databases is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while Toad for Oracle is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0. Foglight for Databases holds a 7.6% mindshare in DDM, compared to Toad for Oracle’s 4.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Foglight for Databases users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Toad for Oracle users who would recommend it.

Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Foglight for Databases reviews

1,842 Views
1,824 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Toad for Oracle

Read 16 Toad for Oracle reviews

1,065 Views
1,033 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Foglight for Databases

Toad for Oracle

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

Foglight for Databases and Toad for Oracle compete in the database management software category, with Foglight having an advantage due to its broader platform support and in-depth monitoring capabilities.

Features: Foglight provides comprehensive monitoring across multiple database platforms like SQL and MySQL, a single-pane-of-glass view, and the SQL Performance Investigator for in-depth insights. Toad for Oracle focuses on Oracle databases, offering PL/SQL debugging, session management, and intuitive code navigation.

Room for Improvement: Foglight users face challenges with alert noise and reporting setup, indicating a need for better alert customization and simpler report models. Toad for Oracle could improve performance in code completion, handling larger trace files, and usability for query execution.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both products are commonly deployed on-premises and are supported in cloud environments. Foglight is praised for its rapid Premier Support, influencing customer satisfaction and renewals. Toad for Oracle receives positive feedback for its technical support and efficient problem resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Foglight is viewed as a premium solution with a pricing structure that offers significant ROI by preventing outages and optimizing resources, though it may be costly in some regions. Toad for Oracle, perceived as costly, is considered worthwhile in Oracle environments due to its development efficiency and long-term productivity gains.

To learn more, read our detailed Foglight for Databases vs. Toad for Oracle Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. Toad for Oracle

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Foglight for Databases

Ranking in Database Development and Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Toad for Oracle

Ranking in Database Development and Management

7th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of Foglight for Databases is 7.6%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Toad for Oracle is 4.3%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

Stuart Dairiki

Senior IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Empowers efficient database monitoring and performance troubleshooting with powerful workload analysis

I find it extremely helpful to use Foglight to triage any database issues, specifically performance issues using what Foglight calls PI investigator. It is a very powerful workload analysis tool that helps me understand where bottlenecks are. It allows me to see performance issues as end users report them. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it. Foglight provides us with a near-real-time activity database. It's not 100% real-time. It has less than a minute latency. It allows us to see performance issues as end-users report them. We started seeing benefits pretty much immediately. We use Foglight to display intensive databases. However, it's not something we monitor regularly. It's only something we kind of dig into as we troubleshoot and triage issues. It does help us determine potential IT help issues. When we use Foglight, we find it helps drill down holistically into potential bottlenecks. It helps us to see what is going on in the database. Foglight allows us to monitor multiple database platforms. We use, for example, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Amazon Redshift, and SAP HANA. It gives us insight into our entire landscape of production workloads in near real-time. The solution saves costs when performing root cause analysis. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It allows us to obtain information quicker and easier than by manually compiling information.

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Bikramjeet Singh

Senior Reg Reporting Consultant at Bank of America

Advanced query optimization and tuning features

Sometimes when I write a query, it gives an unusual error code. Toad for Oracle does not have a particular resolution within the application. Then, I have to search for the code and find a solution. I would like Oracle to implement error codes so that we don't have to search for solutions on Google. It would be more convenient if the error codes were included within the application.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"One of the hardest things to do in database management is to evaluate performance deviation across time. The adaptive baseline that Quest is using is by far the most helpful. That doesn't necessarily mean I use it on a daily basis, but it is something that I have not been able to find in any other tool, at the same level."

"The PI module allows [my colleague] to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact."

"The profiler allows us to look at the profiles of the database queries that are being run over time. It allows us to go back to our customers and say that these are some of the queries causing them some headaches. It gives us the opportunity to provide suggestions on how to improve their experience."

"Foglight's Change Tracking capabilities are another huge feature. It is wonderful to be able to do that. People don't realize the amount of information that Foglight gathers from a given server or instance. It gets down to the version of SQL, the disk array, everything that's there. Any change that's made, any upgrade to SQL, shows up on the dashboard almost immediately. You don't know how much time you save just having a tool in your back pocket that does that for you."

"The platform is very stable."

"Foglight is also able to help the DBAs proactively fix problems before they become an issue. It provides them with real-time activity screens that help in this regard. The DBAs are able to go to these screens and look at what's happening in real time, and that buys them time. It helps them see problems ahead of time and find solutions to them."

"We can visualize all the different types of DB servers that we are monitoring in a single pane of glass. It uses a 360-degree overview of the database, for each of those databases that we are monitoring. That includes what kind of resource utilization is happening and what kind of DB parameters are getting monitored, as well as the different types of DB parameters that are being offered for each database type."

"What I really like is the SQL PI feature, which allows us to drill down into queries and identify what is causing contention in the database. Using the SQL PI feature, I am able to drill down into the queries, see what is blocking, and try to improve it."

More Foglight for Databases pros

"A quite simple feature that I have not encountered elsewhere is the "Make Code" feature. I can easily export a complex SQL statement to a programming language. This is a great timesaver as I do not have to type in all of the escape/concatenation characters just to create a SQL statement in C# or C++."

"The product's most valuable features are UI and monitoring."

"I like that it's very flexible and helpful in query accuracy, analysis, and data visualization. I also like the move facilities available in Toad for Oracle. Overall, I think it's a fantastic product for analyzing SQL queries and managing all kinds of queries."

"I haven't seen any issues with scalability. We have about 1000 people on our IT team who use the solution."

"Oracle has advanced query optimization and tuning features that help improve the performance of SQL queries."

"It is very easy to manage all of the objects."

"Toad has a lot of features that are very useful, fast, and well developed."

"One of the most valuable features of Toad for Oracle is its ability to manage sessions by killing those that are hung or blocking other sessions."

More Toad for Oracle pros

Cons

"It would be amazing if they could enable the 'Performance Investigator' functionality across all database platforms."

"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."

"The data model needs improvement when it comes to creating custom reports. That is an area where it needs a bit of improvement. Foglight gathers a lot of information around our databases as part of its monitoring. While I know all this information is in there, trying to pull the metric we want out for custom reports is sometimes hard to find. One nice thing about Foglight is that you can create custom dashboards, which you can easily convert to reports. We would be doing a lot more of that if it weren't for the challenging data model."

"I get a lot of alerts that, while important, are not critical. Then I have to dig in and figure out how to turn alerts off, but not the logging. I want to be able to go back, once we get the other big issues out of the way, and start fine-tuning some of those other areas, but I don't necessarily want to receive an email for all of them."

"The monitoring capabilities for Postgres should be at par with SQL Server. This is the area where we push back on our Quest representative. We want more insights into Postgres."

"Foglight does have a component that allows you to look at things in real time, but it's not as friendly or as efficient in terms of responsiveness as Quest Spotlight is. Foglight might be lacking in this department."

"The system is not that stable. We have been facing a lot of issues. We built a new store environment of Foglight, an environment for monitoring the Lowe's store servers, which are all Db2 servers. The objective is to monitor 800 Db2 servers in each Foglight instance. Up to 150 Db2 servers, the environment was working fine. The moment it crossed 150 or 160, we started having a lot of stability issues."

"It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms."

More Foglight for Databases cons

"I'd like reporting to be more available. If it was a feature that was already installed, more people would take advantage of it."

"I would like to see an improvement in the performance because opening the browser and the editor should be faster."

"Once in a while, I may encounter a memory exception and have to abort the application. On a few occasions, the file that stores the saved connections for the New Connection window will become corrupt and I will lose all of my saved connections. I am not sure if that is a Windows or TOAD issue, but it has happened to all of my developers at some point or another."

"Query optimization is still very resource-intensive."

"It would be beneficial if Toad for Oracle could incorporate OEM features, as having monitoring capabilities in the same interface would simplify workload and management tasks."

"Toad for Oracle could improve code completion, it is very slow."

"Improvement wise, for the user it should show the minimum features on the screen and not all the features. Toad has a lot of features, but most users will use only 5 or 10 based on their role. Nobody needs all the features, and they should provide the option to choose only the required features. Only minimum requirements should be enabled by default. When all the features are shown, the performance is not good; it loads slowly and has hundreds of popups and unnecessary questions."

"It would be better if they had an online option allowing me to connect from anywhere on any device. Sometimes I face some errors, depending on the network and setup. It's not a big issue."

More Toad for Oracle cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."

"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."

"Pricing is very reasonable. We were able to construct a pretty easy contract with Quest, who were very easy to work with and very amenable to what we are trying to do. It worked out well for us."

"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."

"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."

"The price of Foglight could be a little more competitive in Chile, and it should be lowered for long-time customers— at least by 20 percent. Sometimes the price is a limitation. We have seven instances and nearly 5 million users. If Quest Foglight could reduce its prices for the clients that have been with it for a long time, we would be able to have more instances."

"The pricing is okay, it's reasonable."

"Toad for Oracle has a relatively high cost compared to other similar tools."

"The product's pricing is just right because if it were slightly higher, it would not have been as widely adopted as it currently is in our organization."

"I would rate it six, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"In my opinion, this solution is a little expensive, but I understand that good programs cost more money."

"There are paid and free-for-use versions of the product."

"The professional edition is about $1,000 AUD ($700 USD) and the developer version is about twice that much."

"My advice is to try to use the three-year maintenance agreement if possible."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

11%

Performing Arts

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Foglight for Databases?

The pricing is palatable. We've already done one renewal and we are in our second contract. We're happy thus far.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Databases?

It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms. I've been talking to their product development team about enhancements that I wo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Quest Foglight for Databases?

I primarily use the solution for database monitoring, specifically for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, SAP HANA, and AWS Redshift.

See all answers

What do you like most about Toad for Oracle?

The product's most valuable features are UI and monitoring.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Toad for Oracle?

The licensing cost for Toad for Oracle is relatively high, with their license and DPA suite totaling around five thousand dollars.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Toad for Oracle?

It would be beneficial if Toad for Oracle could incorporate OEM features, as having monitoring capabilities in the same interface would simplify workload and management tasks.

See all answers

Comparisons

Spotlight vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 36% of the time

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 26% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

More Foglight for Databases Competitors

Toad Edge vs Toad for Oracle

Compared 25% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Toad for Oracle

Compared 23% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Toad for Oracle

Compared 16% of the time

Toad Data Modeler vs Toad for Oracle

Compared 15% of the time

More Toad for Oracle Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases

August 2025

Download Foglight for Databases product report

Buyer's Guide

Toad for Oracle

July 2025

Download Toad for Oracle product report

Overview

Foglight for Databases offers comprehensive monitoring with real-time activity screens and adaptive baselines. It provides a 360-degree overview and efficient UI, requiring no custom scripts, aiding in proactive issue identification and resolution before impacting end users.

Foglight for Databases is a robust tool for monitoring across multiple platforms, including SQL and Oracle. It provides features like the "Morning Coffee" dashboard and SQL Performance Investigator, enabling effective workload analysis and historical investigation. Despite some challenges with sluggish performance on large data volumes and excessive non-critical alerts, it remains a preferred choice for its ability to support proactive management and resource planning. Users appreciate its centralized view of extensive database systems, enabling swift detection and resolution of issues in real-time.

What are the key features?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Provides cross-platform real-time monitoring, ensuring effective database management.
Adaptive Baselines: Adjusts to various workloads, enhancing monitoring accuracy.
SQL Performance Investigator: Offers detailed workload analysis without server impact.
Proactive Alerts: Delivers timely notifications, aiding in immediate issue resolution.
Efficient UI: Streamlines user interaction, minimizing the need for custom scripts.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Time Saving: Reduces time in root cause analysis, enhancing productivity.
Proactive Management: Detects issues before they affect end users, minimizing downtime.
Resource Planning: Aids in effective allocation planning for enterprise and cloud platforms.

Foglight is extensively implemented in industries managing extensive database systems, handling numerous servers to ensure availability and performance. It assists businesses in resolving blocking and locking deadlocks, crucial for maintaining smooth operations in production and development environments.

Quest Software

With Toad for Oracle, you'll reduce costs and risks by easily ensuring the health and performance of your Oracle Cloud Platform and on-premises databases. ... On the operations side, you can automate administration tasks and proactively manage your databases while embracing performance optimization and risk mitigation.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

CommitDBA

intel, ebay, uber, mars, microsoft

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. Toad for Oracle

July 2025

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